Metaphrase on Ecclesiastes 3

The present time is packed with contraries: births, then deaths; plants’ blossoming, then their withering away; healings and killings; putting up houses, and tearing them down; lamentations and laughter, dirges and dancing. First people collect things from the earth, then they toss them away. At one moment a person is madly in love with a woman, and next moment he hates her with a passion. Now one finds something, now one loses it; now one holds on to something, now one gives it away; one day someone killed, on another he was slain; he spoke, then kept silent; loved, then hated. Human affairs are sometimes a battleground, other times at peace, since things which appeared to be good change to acknowledged evils in no time. So let us cease from aimless thrashing about. For all these things, it seems to me, are calculated to drive people mad with poisoned darts. Some wicked opportunist has this age in his grip, striving mightily to destroy God’s handiwork, deliberately making war upon it from start to finish.

I am convinced that the greatest goods for a human being are cheerfulness and kindness, and one receives even this transitory blessing from God only if justice directs one’s actions. But one can neither subtract from nor add to those eternal and incorruptible matters which God has definitively decreed. Is there anyone, then, who does not regard them with both fear and wonder? For what has happened is settled, while what is to come already exists in foreknowledge. But one who has been unjustly treated has a helper in God. In the regions down below I have seen a pit of punishment which awaits the impious, but there is another place reserved for the good.

I reflected that all things alike are under God’s government and judgment; it is the same for just and unjust, rational and irrational. For to all in like fashion a span of time is allotted and death awaits, and the animal and human races are alike before God, differing from each other only in the ability to speak articulately. But all the same things befall them, and death envelops them, the other animals no differently than human beings. For breath is alike for all, and nothing greater is in human beings, but all are of little moment for the same reason: they are constructed from the same earth and are destined to be dissolved into the same earth. For it is unclear, in regard to human souls, whether they will soar on high, and in regard to the others, those which belong to irrational animals, whether they will drain away. And it seems to me that no other good exists besides comfort and living in the here and now. For I do not suppose that it will be possible to return again to the enjoyment of these things, once a person has tasted death.

*“Metaphrase on Ecclesiastes” in St Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works, The Fathers of the Church vol. 98, translated by Michael Slusser (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 131-133. Available for purchase from Eighth Day Books.